Robert Meyer

Robert Meyer is the Frederick H. Ecker/MetLife Insurance Professor and Co-Director of Wharton's Risk Management and Decision Processes Center. He is a noted scholar whose research focuses on consumer decision analysis, sales response modeling, and decision making under uncertainty. Professor Meyer's work has appeared in a wide variety of professional journals and books, including the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Marketing Science, Management Science, and Risk Analysis. He is currently the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Marketing Research, and an associate editor for the Journal of Marketing. He has previously served as co-editor of Marketing Letters, and associate editor of the Journal of Consumer Research, JMR, and Marketing Science. He has also served on the editorial review board of several major journals.

As co-director of Wharton's Risk center, some of Professor Meyer's recent research has focused on how individuals decide to invest in mitigation against low-probability, high-consequence, events such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and financial losses. Using a blend of field studies and laboratory simulations Professor Meyer and his colleagues have been able to show that failures of preparation that often precede catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina, Sandy, and the 2008/09 housing and equities collapse are consistent with a number of hard-wired biases in how people respond to risk. This includes a tendency for people to fail to learn as much as they should from near-misses, and under-invest in instruments whose value can only be realized in the long run. One of the goals of the risk center is to aid the private and public sectors in developing strategies that allow these biases to be overcome.

At Wharton Professor Meyer has served as chair of the Marketing Department and Vice Dean of Wharton's doctoral programs. His teaching interests include courses in New Product Management, Research Methods, and Marketing Strategy, which he has taught at the MBA, executive MBA, and doctoral levels. He is also an active participant in a number of Wharton's executive education programs.

Professor Meyer joined the marketing faculty in 1990 after spending eight years on the faculty of the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, and two years at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie-Mellon University. He also has served as a visiting professor in the school of economics at the University of Sydney. He received his PhD in Transportation Geography from the University of Iowa in 1980. In addition to his Wharton position Professor Meyer is an associate of the Center for Research on Environmental Decision Making at Columbia University.